Tag: Swarthmore

You know how every picture of the founding fathers shows them with long hair? Plus, they’re all wearing pouffy ruffled shirts? Kind of reminds you of a bunch of hippies, doesn’t it?

Well, Philadelphia, birthplace of the American hippie, turns out to not be that hippieish these days. We visited two Philadelphia-area colleges today with nary a mention of gender — much less gendered bathrooms. One college had a legitimate excuse. Bryn Mawr is a women’s college, so how bathrooms are gendered is probably less of an issue there, but Swarthmore has no excuse. Swarthmore seemed like a good school but nothing made it stand out from the crowd except for a giant lawn chair and a spectacular rose garden. (And in comparison to a spectacularly strange Yoko Ono sculpture that is used for seating by Sarah Lawrence students, the giant lawn chair seems pretty tame.) Bryn Mawr was a little more interesting. It is gorgeous! Boo and I were both buying what Bryn Mawr was selling until we found out that it doesn’t have music or theater departments. That’s a deal breaker for Boo.

So our trip to Philadelphia for college purposes was meh. Tomorrow, we’ll give the home of the founding hippies a chance for redemption when we spend the day sightseeing.